The Burning Gods
by reylomancy
Summary: "You're a child of the goddess of burning sands. You have magic at your fingers, demons beneath your skin, and fire in your heart. You could be more than my equal." Reylo Mythology AU, in which Rey is a desert witch desperate to find water for her people, and Ben is the lapsed sea god she decides she is going to summon.
1. The Witch of Jakku

**Chapter 1**

 _The Witch of Jakku_

* * *

They say she is a witch. They say the goddess of the burning sands birthed her, and all the demons of the desert live beneath her gold-flecked skin. They burn their dead on piled-stone pyres, to keep her from scavenging the bodies for her tinctures. They burn her scraggly grove of date palms once, her storehouse tarred with bitumen twice. They burn her, and her mother the desert burns them. A vicious cycle, the people of Jakku call it.

Her name is Rey. As in ray of sun. It may seem pleasant enough anywhere else, but it is an ugly name in the desert, a harsh cruel name for a harsh cruel witch. It is like naming a child Pain, or Death, or Fear. Burning Heat. Hateful Thing. Rey.

The villagers are wrong to think she wishes to scavenge their dead though, and they're likely wrong about her mother too. Rey doesn't know whose daughter she is, but she doubts any connection to the goddess of burning sands. After all, Rey knows no filial privilege—her feet burn and her lips crack and her thirst is constant, same as all of Jakku. The only demons she knows to sleep in her bones are loneliness and fear and anger and emptiness. Hardly ones befitting a girl named for the fierceness of the sun.

Same as all of Jakku, she also avoids her namesake, working mornings and evenings in her storehouse, when the desert is finally cool enough to withstand her magic fires. She spends her days sleeping fitfully, one ear always trained to listen for the shifting of footsteps above the howling desert winds. Her storehouse is full of myrrh and pickled olives and crushed barley—no hearts or teeth or nails. Not that the villagers listen long enough for her to tell them so.

Loneliness is probably Rey's most vicious demon, the one whose claws she thinks she may really and truly feel dragging against her skin. Hunger may carve out her belly until her bones jut like the rocky spine of the Carbon Ridge in the distance, but there are always figs to eat and milk to drink. There is nothing to take for loneliness, no tonic or brew to swallow. She knows, she's tried.

* * *

The sky is dark as a bruise, the air thick with ozone instead of dust for once. Rey sits patiently in the open doorway of her sleeping hut, a deep clay jug balanced between her knobby knees. She watches as the storm breaks over the Carbon Ridge, the sky that spreads over its peaks running dark as wine. She chants a prayer that the rains hold out until the clouds reach Jakku.

They don't.

* * *

They call her a witch, and a dangerous one, but Rey considers herself mediocre. She can summon only a handful of useful things out of the sand—barley, fire, a healing wind, and once, a staff that glows like coals at night—and a whole slew of unwanted things—thorns, scorpions, bones that whisper to each other, a thick smoke that will refuse to dissipate.

There is no spell she knows to summon those things she truly wants, those things she suspects one day she will fall down dead for want of if she never gets them, same as food or water. Family. Friends. Belonging. Love.

She has tried calming salves to sooth the anxiety of the villagers she manages to corner, clay masks that are charmed to disguise her. Nothing works. Nothing is permanent enough. She despairs each time she chisels a mark into the wall above her bed, a line for every failed attempt. The marks look down on her like the night sky as she sleeps, the enormity of her shortcomings pressing down on her.

There is one spell Rey will not give up on though, no matter how heavily it weighs on her every night to carve the mark of the day's failure above her head.

She will summon a water god, and bind him to this place, so Jakku can finally have the rain it needs to flourish. She will put the demons beneath her skin to good use. She will set herself on fire if she must. She will chase the belonging she craves across these burning sands, if she has to.

* * *

A full cycle of the moon has finished, and Rey sits again at her open door, the same empty jug clasped between her legs as she watches another storm release itself just outside her reach. The sweetness of the rain on the wind is a taunt and nothing more as Rey watches the clouds drizzle until they are empty. When the sun is shining all around her again, quickly burning off the petrichor and any hint of dampness, she clambers angrily to her feet. The clay pot shatters against the mudbrick exterior of the hut, the pieces instantly sinking into the sand.

Rey begins to pack.

She leaves most of the collection in her storehouse behind, taking only the things she will miss if the men burn down her hut a third time in her absence. A bit of frankincense she was able to trade for with Maz Kenata's caravan, before the villagers managed to poison most of the merchants against her. A bronze knife with arabesques carved in the handle, given to her by Maz herself as a parting gift last her caravan had passed through. Her glowing staff; though she summoned it from the sands herself, she has never been able to create its like.

There is no one to tell, to bid farewell, when she leaves on the three day's journey for the Carbon Ridge.

* * *

The heady wine color of the jagged peaks fades to an ordinary brown just a few shades darker than the golden sands as Rey gets closer—a trick of the horizon, no doubt. Her footsteps have become easier, stronger, taking her farther than she could have ever imagined; desert rat that she is, she's never had the privilege of crossing ground that's packed hard beneath her legs. Her footfalls feel strangely solid, her teeth ringing in her head with the impact of each step, and she grins, feeling surer of herself than she ever has.

The land that lies against the base of the Carbon Ridge is etched with wadis, their patterns as complex and spreading as the arabesques on Rey's knife. She walks straight down the belly of one, a spell for wind tucked under her tongue and another for earth pinched between her thumb and forefinger. The wadis are known for their flash floods this time of year, and she will need breath in her lungs and a steady patch of ground if she is going to survive against one of those brutal, whipping currents.

Rey is watchful of flooding, but she can't help but notice how dry the wadi seems around its edges, how there is scarcely any green in it to cut the neverending tumble of brown and gray stones that stretches below her feet. She can feel the earth spell thrumming in her hand, its power strong with no water beneath the ground to interfere.

Rey keeps to the path, hums a prayer for the land as she goes.

* * *

The wadi leads Rey right to the sea. She could cry at the sight of so much water before her, and takes off running toward its edge without a second thought.

She stops just short of the water's warm, lapping reach. Her feet are stinging as they slap against the pristine, crystalline white shore, stinging with so much pain she must stop. Rey lowers herself to the ground, flinches at the sharpness that meets her hands. This beautiful white beach is not soft and loose, like her desert, but coarse and hard as the mountains between which it is nestled. She lifts one foot to examine, and watches as drops of her blood slowly drip down onto the white dust below, blooming like strange vibrant flowers. While the cuts bleed, Rey finds they are not deep. And yet they suffer from a sting that rivals that of venom, the pain burning hot and high until it sends tears into Rey's eyes. She can taste the salt as they run over her cheeks to catch in her cracked lips. Her lips sting too.

Dread of this place has started to gather cold and heavy in Rey's chest. She lowers her fingers to scrabble in the pale dust, then brings them to her lips and tastes them. It's salt dusting her hands. Salt in her wounds.

It's all somehow salt, she learns, once she chants the ingredients in her satchel into a salve for her feet and continues onward. The shore, the sea. The rocks are crusted with it, the barren wadi is no doubt laced with it. Everything about this place resonates wrong with Rey's bones. To her, to everyone else in Jakku, water is life. To be confronted with this sea of… of death, it shakes Rey to her core.

She begins to wonder whether she hunts a god, or a monster.

* * *

Despite the deep-seated feeling of wrongness this place has about it, Rey persists. She takes a day to build herself a sleeping hut stacked out of rocks, searches for a charm that will spin her new bowls from the dark mud that rims the shoreline. It takes her a few tries—she isn't used to working with wet material. When the bowls are done, she fills them with everything she can find that gives off even a whisper of magic about it. She takes endless, endless bowls of water and mud and dried salt. When she finds the barren shoreline lacking, she scales the cliffs that hem in the sea, where she gathers strange stones and thin weeds and even a few round bird eggs. She takes her own blood from when she slips on the wet rocks at the shoreline and cuts herself on the sharp formations of dried salt before it. She takes rainwater she finds in creases within the cliffs, for both magic and drinking. The rest of the wine she has traveled with must go to the god of this strange place, when she is ready to offer to it.

The moon has completed a quarter cycle before Rey decides she may as well begin courting this god, if it is even still alive. It takes her three days to select good stones of power, two more to stack them into a small temple lined with cairns and seal it all with mud. She decorates the dried mud floor with thick crystals of salt, in patterns meant to look like the swirling, criss-crossing wadis. She makes many, many more bowls, fills them with salt and sea and rainwater. After some deliberation, she adds a few bowls of the fire she so expertly conjures as well. Fire and water may be opposing elements, but a sea would not be threatened by her meager flames. Surely a god would take the reminder of its might as flattery?

She sleeps in her hut, across the beach from the temple, and watches her flames flicker in the gaps between the cairns at night while she counts down the many subtle shapes of the moon. She is waiting for a moon-less sky and a low tide, so she might have some chance of defending herself against what she hunts, should things go badly.

* * *

When the night comes, she bathes naked in the sea below the stars and the darkened moon, lets her golden feet cake with mud and salt as she walks to the temple. She leaves her dark hair unbound and wavy with dried salt spray, her body free of the loose, flowing garments that belong to the desert and its burning sands.

Rey sings as she makes her offerings, her voice low and thick with the sea air as she gathers her bowls. She feeds the god's ego first, pouring a brackish mixture of rain and sea water out over a handful of rocks and a jumping fire. Rey jerks at the hot steam that rises up to fill the temple with a sharp hiss as the flames try to resist their demise.

She feeds its belly next, mixes the last of her wine into a second bowl of the brackish concoction, stirs it with her fingers and watches as the clear water quickly darkens.

Last of all, she feeds that fearful godly appetite, that dark insistence all divines seem to share for pain and sacrifice, that inhuman craving not for meat or fat, but bone and blood. Into this third bowl of waters, Rey allows her own blood to drip, from a wound across her arm inflicted by Maz's bronze knife.

She may as well give it a taste for her flesh now, if she is going to bind this thing to her, Rey thinks.

She is hardly faint-hearted, but she feels her head begin to spin at the smell of wine and blood and brine that thickens the wet warm air inside the temple. Her pulse starts pounding in her ears, and Rey swears the mud in the walls begins to weep, but she sings until she feels her eyes flutter shut.

* * *

She awakens to sunset on the cliffs overlooking the sea: her favorite time of day in this foreboding place that feels alive yet dead (her desert is the opposite: bleak looking, but oh what things pulse beneath the surface).

Rey is startled to find she is not alone here.

A man sits near the cliff's edge, huddled in on himself, arms crossed around his knees as his eyes track the sun's steady descent. Despite his crouched posture, Rey can tell he is long limbed and powerfully built, yet with an apparent air of grace to his sinews.

He doesn't seem to see her standing alongside him, as he looks straight on. He's beautiful, Rey realizes with a sick throb of her heart. His skin is nearly as pale white as the shore, his thick wavy hair as richly dark as the sea's mud. His eyes are a complicated sort of brown, muddy, yet with something clear and bright to them that reminds Rey of the horizon he watches now, his chin balanced on his arms.

Rey lets out a shaky breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding, and his face—somehow sharp, yet also soft—snaps to her. His plush lips are rosy with the sunset and parted in surprise as he looks at her for the first time, and Rey's heart flutters in her chest as she absurdly decides that she'd love to kiss this absolute stranger.

In an instant, his soft, open expression hardens into a scowl, and the sunset blots out behind a sudden rumbling swirl of thunderclouds. His pale skin takes on a cold, dead sheen that nearly mirrors the white-blue lightning that rips and tears across the sky.

Rey swallows hard, but there are no spells stashed beneath her tongue to help her now. In fact, her magic feels strangely dead in this place. She can't feel anything but him, she realizes with a jolt.

He has risen to his feet—she was right, he's as tall as a godling—and his hands are strangely cold as they grip her naked shoulders. The wind is shrieking around them now, and when he speaks the words he grits them through his pale, clenched jaw. Yet somehow, his low-pitched voice finds Rey's ears.

"Leave. Me. Alone."

And with no further preamble, he tosses her over the edge of the cliff, into the wind-raged sea.

* * *

 **Notes:**

 _I wrote this for the daily prompts I'm trying to write on tumblr (this prompt being Mythology Monday). I was supposed to write no more than 3,000 words over the course of an hour or two, just as an exercise to flex my rusty writing muscles. I ended up spending my entire day writing an 8,000 word behemoth, so I guess I'm starting a multi-chapter *sighs eternally*_

 _I shouldn't be surprised I got so into this prompt though I guess. I'm currently working on an original novel, and the plot of this fanfic is going to skirt rather close to an early draft I once had planned for my own book. This is loosely inspired by the Middle East/Mesopotamian mythology. People aren't generally super familiar with this stuff, so I won't get super detail heavy, but I guess know that those inspirations are there?_

 _Anyway, I'm hoping to be quick in updating this one, since this first chapter is only a fraction of what I currently have written, but I'm trash, so we shall see!_


	2. The God of the Sea

**Chapter 2**

 _The God of the Sea_

* * *

Rey wakes up in a panic and choking on spray. She's back in the temple, which has gone pitch dark without the light of a fire, and freezing cold. Her teeth nearly clatter too hard to speak the spell to realight her bowls, and as soon as she is successful, a sea-drenched gale quickly undoes her efforts anyway.

She darts outside, and her jaw slackens with shock. The tide has eaten up the shore until it nearly reaches the doorway to the temple. A howling wind buffets her face with salt spray lifted from churning waves that are mere steps away. Overhead, the sky has opened up in a colossal torrent.

Teeth chattering and naked skin tender with gooseflesh, Rey sprints for her hut, before what few possessions she has here are flooded out and carried off to sea. She swears the wind picks up as she runs, as if it is racing her there, and she chews on a spell of air to keep her light-footed across the slippery rocks.

She gets there just in time to salvage a change of clothes and her staff. She can smell her herbs and poultices as they mingle with the flood waters, can hear the crack of the stones behind her as the hut collapses into the powerful encroaching waves. Rey is already running for the cliffs.

She spends the night wedged into a crease high up on the rocks, struggling to keep a magical flame going for long enough to dry out while the world rages in diluvian chaos below. No louder than the chattering of her own teeth in her head, the sea, the storm, the sodden, rioting wind itself all seem to howl.

 _leave me alone_

* * *

Rey waits on the cliffs for two days, but the waters don't recede. On the third day, she finally decides there is nothing else to do but take the only wadi she can access from her perch, a steep-walled canyon with just a trickle running at the bottom that slowly turns from salty to brackish to fresh the longer she follows it north. It's a difficult journey without any food stores to supplement the water she scoops from the creases of the stones underfoot, but Rey is hardy, and her efforts are rewarded when she reaches a settlement just before nightfall on the second day.

She is not known in this village, and the people are kind to her with an earnestness that makes her heart ache. She refrains from magic while she is there, to stretch the people's good graces, but their goodwill begins to wither once she starts asking after the salt sea and the chaotic thing that guards it.

The only one who will discuss it with Rey is a gruff old farmer, who takes a liking to her but pretends he hasn't. She milks his goats for him while he rests on a stool and fiddles with her staff. If he's noticed its strange glow, he says nothing of it. At Rey's prompting, Luke spins his story slowly, tangentially, as the old are wont to do.

"When I was a younger man, a _long_ time ago," he begins, light blue gaze wandering out toward the southern horizon, and Rey imagines he is trying to pinpoint the very crags that cradle the sea in their rough arms. "I started a school out there. You could drink the water then. It was… safe." His story almost instantly shatters into a million scattered asides—the fish they caught there, the afternoons the younger boys spent paddling around in the shallows like puppies, memories of the wildest ones and their antics. Rey allows him to talk for a bit before gently guiding him back. She gets the sense these are stories he does not allow himself to tell often, and to hold them in has worn him over the years.

"There was a time when the gods were terrible and bloodthirsty. New demons were born with every sunset. The rivers flooded and the farmland crumbled to salt and the wars between tribes were bitter, bloody feuds. The divine had grown tired of people, and were ready to reclaim the earth for themselves."

"What stopped them?" Rey can't keep herself from interjecting.

Luke raises and drops one hunched shoulder beneath his cloak. "There was a war, kiddo. Some of the divine were still merciful, and they fought to preserve humanity."

"But why would they care?" Rey is well acquainted with a worldview with a more violent tilt to it. She has weathered droughts and famines and floods and bloodshed—there are few, if any, benevolent desert gods.

"I think a handful genuinely feel compassion for us, or perhaps it is pity. But most of them simply understand that they need the praise of mortals to keep them strong enough to hold onto their power." Rey grimaces. She's prayed and made offerings countless times, but never had she imagined in those moments that her role in the rites would be regarded as little more than fodder.

Luke gives the goat an affectionate scratch behind its ears as Rey finishes milking it. He continues, "A balance was reached between the gods, but only for awhile. New gods came eventually, new gods that listened close to the stories of their brutal ancestors, who placed no value on human lives. They were the ones to realize the mistake of these old gods, while simultaneously turning away from the gentle balance that had been forged. They learned what was stronger than happiness or wealth or contentment. They began to trade in threats, fear, terror. They turned the balance to darkness, instead of light."

Here Luke suddenly shifts uncomfortably in his seat, keeping his eyes fixed on a faraway point, where Rey cannot meet them.

"Most of these new gods were harsh and cruel from the beginning, without ever giving us a chance to show them what we could offer them unbidden, without them resorting to threats and cataclysms. But maybe they were right to do so, because others… others weren't cruel from the beginning. Others learned." His gruff voice fades, and Rey can see he is unwilling to go on.

"What do you mean _learned_?" she presses. He has told her too much to fall silent now.

Luke brushes a gnarled hand along the handguard on Rey's staff, his fingers gentle. Rey thinks he might be breaking off onto another tangent, but she finds it is not one she could easily lead him away from, as he suddenly comments, "It's been a long time since I've seen magic like this in a weapon." He huffs a quiet laugh. "Interesting choice. I would have gone with a scimitar perhaps. But then, I was always overly fond of my Imperial gladius as a young man. Don't have enough change left in me to learn to wield something like this."

Rey's mouth swings open in surprise. Her mind spins, unsure which thread to pursue first: his recognition of magic, his tale of the cruel young gods, or his reminiscing about a weapon that hasn't been used in at least a hundred years.

He chuckles at her thunderstruck expression.

"I was familiar with magic, once, though this is the first of it I've touched in years. My sister is better at it. Her, you've likely heard of. Her name is Leia."

"... the _warrior goddess_ , Leia?" The question feels absurd on Rey's lips, but she asks it anyway. Luke smiles.

"Our mother was a minor goddess. Her father was a god, while mine was a kind of… demon. He was a mortal once, a witch actually, until he strayed to the study of magics he should never have meddled with. I have his mortal nature, though my mother gifted me with an especially long life."

All of these revelations about the simple farmer who sits before her, goat milk in his grizzled beard and a sly twinkle in his eyes, have distracted Rey entirely from her initial line of questioning. Luke, however, has continued his story with clear intent, and he circles back around now to their first topic.

"Leia had a son, my nephew. He belonged to this generation of new, vicious gods. Mortals are more precious to Leia than they are to most divines, and she feared for what her son could become if left unchecked. So we conspired together. She would send him with me, to live among the other boys at my school. We hoped he would learn affection for mortals there, as Leia had while being raised alongside me."

His voice suddenly frays, and he sounds every inch a mortal, no hint of the goddess's son in him. "I failed him, utterly. I sensed the potential for power in him, but I ignored it. I tried raising him as a boy instead of a god, and he chafed against it. He began to crave the power that others, his _true_ peers, wielded. He must have learned how they became what they are, because one day he sent a dreadful storm that swelled the basin of the sea. Nearly every one of my students drowned in the deluge."

Rey's thoughts flash to her last night on the beach, the sea-drenched wind that had nearly stolen her breath, the waves that had destroyed everything she had built, and would have taken her too had she let them. She feels her skin go ashen and cold.

"I shouted curses into the wind from the cliffs all night long, when I saw what he had done. In the morning, when the waters had receded enough for me to emerge, I tasted the first of the salt, and I knew then that I had damned us. The families of each of my students... they were wild with their fury. They flung their own curses, and every bitter word was a handful of salt thrown into the water. I haven't seen my nephew since."

Luke is staring out to the ridge in the south again, his face far away. But Rey watches the people who mill around outside the open flap of Luke's tent, their faces friendly and gentle as they enjoy the coolness that has come with the sun's low seat in the sky. She tries to imagine their faces twisted in rage and anguish—no, their ancestors' faces, if Luke is as old as he says. She finds it is not a hard picture to paint; she has seen such faces, contorted against her, in Jakku.

The half-god beside her sighs heavily, drawing her attention once more. "He used to send down storms and hold back water in droughts to threaten us, but the people here have adapted over the years, learned to find water elsewhere. No one worships him. No one remembers to curse him either. I don't know if he will someday vanish altogether, or find a way to flood his reach and destroy us all. I may not live long enough to see it, either way."

Luke contemplates her as he hands her staff back. "A witch from Jakku, a nowhere place full of thirsting people. I can guess what you were doing out on the ridge, Rey." He chuckles softly at her. "I can see what a hard little weed you already are, and I'm sure your roots must run deep in this land to keep you standing. But kid, I'm telling you now," he meets her eyes, "this is not going to go the way you think."

"Forget the sea, forget Jakku. Find somewhere new, and start over."

* * *

Rey likes Luke, despite all that he has confessed to her. She stays in Tatooine for a time, and it feels almost like what belonging must. And yet, sleep cannot fully find her so long as she lingers on his quiet farm. Besides, she is restless to return to Jakku, anxious to puzzle out a new approach to her goal. She refuses to be dissuaded. She cannot afford it.

It is not until she is halfway through the desert, on her way back to Jakku, that the kind of sleep with which dreams come finds Rey.

She's back on the cliffs that overlook the sea. It's not morning or evening now, but midday. The sky burns overhead as Rey opens her eyes, but in an indirect way that lacks the sun's true focused heat. It's her first hint she might be dreaming.

Her second one is the beautiful man.

He's sitting near the edge again, but this time his legs are dangling over the side, and he leans back on his hands languidly. He frowns at her as she sits up, her eyes adjusting to the bright light. Their shadows lie hidden beneath them, and in the harsh light every detail of his sullen face is presented for her examination. At his back, the pale blue sea sparkles with sunlight.

"I told you to leave me alone," his deep voice grumbles. She can tell she's caught him off guard again, but he's less vulnerable and volatile this time, more annoyed and resigned.

She clears the dust out of her throat. "I didn't do anything!" He raises one dark eyebrow at her, and Rey fights the blush that wants to rise up on her cheeks at her next admission, "I think I'm… dreaming of you."

If possible, his frown deepens.

The dream fades away before he can comment on her observation. When Rey wakes, she feels as hot and feverish as if it were high noon, despite the cool dune of sand she is nestled in. She swears she smells salt in her nose, though the desert around her is nothing but dark, empty sands. Rey quickly pushes the dream out of her head, rubs the sleep from her eyes and prepares to cross a few more leagues before the sun can start its burning march over the horizon. She has far more important things to be thinking of.

* * *

The next time Rey dreams, she is back in Jakku. Miraculously, she finds her storehouse still standing, but many of her supplies have been pilfered, her clay jugs shattered. She simply shrugs as she hums the command for her sands to knit them back together. She sleeps too heavily for dreams the first few nights, as she works to replenish her supplies and sweep the dust from her floors and her bed.

The next time she dreams, she is back on the cliffs, and this time he is ready for her.

"Why are we connected?" he questions her as soon as her eyes are open. It appears to be evening this time, the hour just following sunset, when the sky is soft and the light fades fast. The sea below whooshes calmly, its potential for catastrophe belied by its gentle, deep blue surface.

She's busy calculating the change in her surroundings, and she sees the impatience flash across his narrow, pale face like a flash of white lightning as he waits for her answer.

"Why are we connected, mortal?" he repeats, his words stiff with his annoyance and… condescension… and… _mortal_?

"My name is Rey, not _mortal_ ," she retorts, fixing him with a queer look before returning her gaze to the darkening sea before them. Better not to look at him at all. He's standing today, and closer to her than he's ever been (if she doesn't count the time he pushed her over...). Rey refuses to be cowed by his height, or distracted by his impressive build. His _chest_ …

"I didn't ask for your name, _mortal_ , I asked, what did you do to connect us?" he hisses.

With that sentence, several things fall into place for Rey.

This beautiful man, who always appears to her alongside the dead sea (which seems so much more vividly alive somehow in these dreams of hers...), who feels the need to differentiate her a mortal, must not be mortal himself. If he is an immortal, who else could he be, but the god of this sea? She'd seen it from the beginning, hadn't she? His salt-sculpted skin and muddy brown eyes, the way the brine seems a part of his hair, twisting it into a work of art…

"Murderer! You're a… you're a monster!" Rey spits without thinking, hazel eyes hardening in disgust, despite the beauty of the… _being_ before her.

She regrets it with her very next breath—he is a god, surely he can smite her even in her dreams—and her fists clench, steeling herself against whatever punishment her outburst has earned her. Instead, she watches, surprised, as emotions scuttle swiftly across his expressive face. She struggles to catch each one as it passes in the low light, but she swears she sees in him apprehension, regret, fear…

She must be drunk with sleep, because it would be impossible for this hard man, no, this _cruel god_ , who pushed her from these very cliffs and sent a storm to drown her, to feel such decent, human emotions.

A wind begins to blow high up on their shared cliff, building into a keening, mournful wail, and she thinks she hears him whisper, "I am," before the dream fades to the familiar blackness that she's come to expect after these visions.

* * *

 **Notes:**

The divine!Leia, mortal!Luke dynamic is inspired by the Greek myth of Leda's egg.

Luke's Imperial sword is a throwaway reference to the Roman Empire, which I just HAD to make, because Star Wars, despite the fact that I have been trying to write this with sort of an Early Persian tilt. Ancient history scholars out there who realize we would be dealing with a chronology that is jumbled on the order of anywhere from 500 to 1,000 years, don't me!

Thank you so much for the comments, likes, and favorites! Hearing from you all puts a huge smile on my face! Thanks for reading, I hope you're all enjoying reading as much as I am writing :)


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